The Bayer Music Group and their label EBS have a good track record
when it comes to the music of Max Bruch. Someone there must like
him. Surprisingly they still issue an LP, although it has been
transferred to CD (EBS 6071), which includes the Overture to the
opera Die Loreley and the viola Romance Op.85, while the
other two works on it - albeit with different conductor and orchestra
- appear on the discs under review, the Suite on Russian folksongs
Op.79b and the First Symphony Op.28. Their website lists 15 CDs
of Bruch, though one is the LP and the other misleadingly is a
disc of Christmas music which includes two by Bernward Bruchhäuser-Meisemann,
born a century later. Of the remaining thirteen, eight are devoted
entirely to music by Bruch, while on the other five he appears
with other composers. As to the works themselves, the usual suspects
are there, but the choral music is worth exploration. In 2005
EBS issued the ubiquitous first violin concerto coupled with the
third (Torsten Janicke the soloist on EBS 6143). The second concerto
now takes its place in the 3cd-box entitled ‘The romantic symphonist’.
As far as works for the violin and orchestra are concerned Bruch
wrote nine, which, back in the 1980s, Philips produced as a boxed
set of vinyl played by Accardo under Masur. Together with the
three symphonies they are now on CD (Philips 462 164-2 and 462
167-2). The Romanze is also available on Fleur de Son 57925 and
Vox Classics VXP 7906, while Naxos now has it together with the
Konzertstück as part of 8.557689. The same team of Fedotov/Yablonsky
on Naxos 8.557395 couples the Scottish Fantasy with the
relatively unfamiliar Serenade Op.75. It is to be hoped that such
imaginative policies on the part of the independent record companies
will dispel the commonly held belief that Bruch was a one-work
composer of that concerto and little else.

At
the heart of the EBS box-set in their series Der romantische
Sinfoniker lies the three symphonies, previously recorded
by Masur (on Philips, who reissued them with different fillers)
and Conlon (EMI), while Hickox did only 1 and 3 with the LSO
on Chandos. In fact there are no less than twelve recordings
of the three symphonies, five, three and four of each respectively,
which made an impact in their day (1868, 1870 and 1882) and
which went some way to filling the black hole between Schumann’s
last and Brahms’ first over a remarkably long period of a quarter
century. Carl Dahlhaus credits no one with writing any meaningful
symphonies during this time, but it is becoming easier to take
issue with his view, thanks to the unearthing of works by Bruch,
Dietrich, Lachner, Hiller, Rufinatscha, Gernsheim, Draeseke,
Volkmann and others. They are not to be dismissed out of hand.

In
1870 Bruch opted for a freelance career as a composer after
five years in post as a conductor/composer at Coblenz and Sondershausen
respectively. This pattern of alternating the security of a
paid conducting post with the freelance option as a composer
would persist until 1890 when he became professor of composition
in Berlin. Bruch never again achieved the success of his first
violin concerto (1868). Curiously it was through his secular
oratorios such as Odysseus in 1870 that his fame spread,
even to England, where its success eventually led to his appointment
to Liverpool 1880-1883. As far as violin concertos were concerned,
he attempted a second early in 1874, but his love life was going
through a troubled patch, and after completing the first movement
he lost his muse, the rest of the work becoming no more than
‘a glimmer of ideas’. He was, however, pleased with what he
had written and encouraged by positive responses from his friends
and colleagues, so he decided to publish it as a single movement
Romanze in A minor Op.42. Based on two typically lyrical
melodies, according to one critic it was based on the Nordic
saga of ‘Gudrun’s Lament by the Sea’, but knowing the composer’s
aversion to programmatic music and what was happening to him
at the time, it is far more likely to be subtitled ‘Max’s Lament
by the Rhine for Amalie Heydweiller’, whose love he had just
lost. As the first movement to his projected second violin concerto
it is unusual in that it is slow, and interestingly Bruch persists
with this idea when he did indeed come to write that concerto
three years later in 1877.

By
the time Bruch came to write the Konzertstück he was
over seventy years old. It was written for the American violinist
Maud Powell, and again it became a truncated concerto, although
this time in two linked movements rather than one. It was dedicated
to Willy Hess, who Bruch had helped to return from his post
as leader of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to teach at the Berlin
Music Academy (he had also led the Hallé Orchestra and frequently
performed Bruch’s concertos). Powell gave its first performance
at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut on 8 June 1911, and part
of the work was subsequently recorded, the first music by Bruch
to be so. ‘She has played the Adagio alone, half of it
cut, into a machine (!!!). I told her a few truths’, he wrote
later that month. This Adagio uses the Irish folksong
‘The Little Red Lark’ underlining the composer’s love for folk
music. It is a beautiful movement, in slow 3/8 time reminiscent
of the Adagio from Op.26, written soon after the death
of his great friend and adviser on matters of the violin, Joachim,
and is the last music Bruch wrote for solo violin and orchestra.
Four decades after the G minor concerto of 1868, the circle
had been completed.

Ursula
Schoch’s playing in the five works in which she features is
both sweet-toned and full-blooded in sound and passionately
committed, at the same time technically solid with clean intonation
and phrasing; the performance of the Konzertstück should
bring a tear to the eye. She plays a 1755 Guadagnini, and now
holds a chair among the first violins of the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra in Amsterdam. She clearly loves Bruch’s music, and
the orchestra and two conductors serve her well in their accompaniments,
despite what appears to have been a mishap in the editing process
when a wrong note was missed by both sound engineer and conductor
in the second movement of the Konzertstück. In the third
bar of letter G on the third beat, the first trombone plays
C natural instead of C flat, resulting in a dissonance Bruch
would never have written; (CD 2, track 5 at 4’ 35”) this minor
7th in the chord of D flat major is a dominant 7th
in the home key of G flat major. Despite this oversight, conductor
of the first volume Johannes Wildner gets to grips with the
symphonies after a somewhat tense No.1, the first movement starts
sluggishly while the third has some unwarranted rushing in places
(maybe to get through weak passages more quickly or the result
of inconsistency of tempo at retakes). One has to accept Bruch’s
occasional paucity of ideas in his finales, and his reliance
on the arpeggio and the frequent string-scrubbing (which
Bruckner was soon to perfect) to get his effects. Also what
Herr Wildner did not know was my discovery of an original Intermezzo
by Bruch, which was the symphony’s original second movement,
but he removed it after two performances in Sondershausen. What
Bruch then did was to call the Quasi Fantasia the symphony’s
third (slow) movement, where originally it was linked (and remains
so despite dropping the Intermezzo) to the Finale.

In
the second volume Dutchman Theo Wolters is at the helm and proves
a sensitive accompanist to Frau Schoch in the Serenade
Op.75. This is a fine work heard too little in concerts, and
given its length and complexity, it is in all but name really
a fourth concerto. Ensemble is excellent, as it is also in the
charming and beautifully played Romanze Op.42. Bruch
always complained that little beyond the G minor concerto was
ever programmed, but he hardly helped his cause by writing single
movement works (besides those for the violin, there were also
four for cello and one for viola). These days they are uneconomic
(in exchange for a soloist’s fee a concert promoter will want
his musical pound of flesh) but perhaps it was easier in the
composer’s time when programmes often consisted of many short
works. The Konzertstück consists of two linked movements
and ends slowly and quietly, the second symphony is in three
movements without a scherzo, all of which defied public taste
in his and our day. On the other hand the Serenade is
unconventionally long in four movements. For such a conservative
traditionalist, Bruch was remarkably bold and inventive when
it came to formatting his compositions. Whether it took one,
two or four movements to say what he had to say, so be it. In
the case of the Swedish Dances Op.63, he even advocated
making a selection, feeling that to listen to the Introduction
followed by fifteen dances was indigestible for its audience.
For someone who usually complained that his music was not performed
enough, here he was suggesting making a selection. Finally the
Suite on Russian folksongs Op.79b is a good example of
Bruch’s love of folk music, for him throughout his life a constantly
rich seam of endless melody. From it, and to get away from an
overdose of Chopin’s Funeral March, the Soviet leadership might
well have used its sombre third movement Funeral March for one
of their deceased leaders when they were dropping like flies
in the early 1980s. As played here, the work sounds very idiomatic,
the material for the final movement of the four will sound familiar,
being the ‘Song of the Volga Boatman’. In both discs, the orchestra
produces gloriously sumptuous sounds with fine tone and many
stylishly shaped solos though the leader could have been closer
miked in his two brief solos in the Funeral March.

This is a hybrid Super
Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players,
hence the billing as a SACD premiere recording. For
collectors of everything they can get their hands on by Bruch,
apart from the sound, there is nothing new here in the way of
repertoire, but nevertheless they are both highly enjoyable
discs and very much worth the having.

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